‘ika-tako’ Virus Creator Gets Jail Sentence

The Tokyo District Court on Wednesday has sentenced malware editor with two years and six months in prison. Masato Nakatsuiji was found responsible for writing a malicious program, which last summer has spread to the locally popular peer to peer file-sharing network Winny, disguised as a music file, and once run the malware works through the files of the hard disk, replacing each with an image of a marine invertebrate this malware is called “ika-tako” (squid/octaputs).

It’s not the first time that Nakatsuji has been arrested for virus creation. In 2008 he was convicted of violating copyright after coding malware that replaced data with an image from anime series Clannad. He told the police in this case that he didn’t think he’d be arrested again because there is no breach of copyright.

Japan enacted a law criminalizing the creation and storing of computer viruses on July 14th. The first individual to be arrested under the new law was Yasuhiro Kawaguchi, a 38-year-old who authored a file that would infect victim’s computers using a file sharing program.